German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Honestly at least relative to the general mood of the software industry I wouldn't say that foss projects don't care about backwards compatibility. The kernel is famous for caring a lot about it. The Debian project is quite known for being relatively conservative. Unfortunately Ubuntu is known for experimenting on its users but thank god nobody is forced to use that.

This is used by normal humans. Who don't want to spend a lifetime getting good at all this complexity, so they muddle around until stuff gets done.

And then you end up with a table in a document where one row is wider than the others (sticks out at the side) and nobody knows how to fix it, and eventually in frustration the whole table gets deleted and redone.

And you end up with lines in graphics that are almost, but not quite, horizontal. And hacks where only the depth arrangement of opaque objects hides the compromises that had to be made to get graphics to look just so. Don't even get me started on localized hacks to page headers and paragraph formats, or extra blank lines or "start on new page" attributes all over, because the "keep with" stuff just doesn't work the way you think it should, that have to be fiddled every time the text reflows significantly.

And that's how you end up with documents that just don't work right in LibreOffice. It's simply impossible for an open source project to keep up with all that by glorified reverse engineering.

As a counterpoint though, you can have exactly the same mess with LibreOffice in the first place. A bunch of documents with muddled weirdness in them that will only display correctly in the tool they were done with. No problem as it all stays in its native tool i.e. doesn't need to export cleanly to MS Office.

One problem with LibreOffice (or whatever it's called this week) is that not all tools are equally good. The spreadsheet and word processor look solid. I'm not so sure about its Powerpoint equivalent though.

Heh, you might not like the answer.

There might be a ton of alternatives somewhere out there, but there's only 1 real thing that seems to work with the information we have so far.

So, what's the answer to these questions:

> Q: How do we get distros that can be good daily drivers for the masses? How do we get people interested in crafting those?

>

Desktop environment polishing work is technically boring work and a thankless job. It's grunge work. Only a minority of experienced devs will do it willingly for a long time.

Outlook is a dumpster fire, and there are perfectly fine alternatives. Very few people actually need the full might of Excel, and you can always RemoteApp it to them, and have the rest use Libre Office. Or heck, provide them with actual tooling better fit for their requirements than Excel.

And in any case, IMHO, "public money, public code". Nothing should be paid for with public money without it being publicly accessible afterwards ( excluding weaponry of course).

Bullshit

> The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in the municipality's administration. It's easy to say that VBS macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you need to provide an alternative.

ah, because of that, departments nowadays cannot exchange word documents with universities, still after the said this would work then? bullshit. And Macros were replaced if the department and users cooperated and didn't wall the project off.

> Simple things like a good calendar, working printing functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the IT was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually gets roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With Limux vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as large as that.

lol, funny. the exchange solution still does not have all the features the old one (which was ugly) had. Bullshit.

I was there. You are just biased. And there are known bugs with Windows and with Office. And ask what? Nobody fixes them, users have to live with it. Back with LiMux and LibreOffice we fixed and repaired stuff.

You use network-manager with openconnect or 802.1x with hooks? or the KDE printing dialog? or libreoffice with the QT interface? you can thank the LiMux project for that.

i'll tell you a little secret: half a year ago there was still no replacement for printer administration which the limux team built, the administration is still done with the config-/deployment solution for limux there. (i do not know the current situation, but that's just ridiculous)

LiMux worked. Stop your shilling. Because NOBODY could tell us real technical problems we couldn't solve. One of us even fixed the borked intel graphics driver once.